While major media may treat the Occupy Wall Street movement tepidly, if paying attention at all, a different feeling hangs in the air in America. In homes and workplaces across the nation, transmitted via technology and through the hearts, minds and voices of the dispossessed – onto the plazas, town squares and streets – thousands are waking up each minute. Today marks a week that an autonomous, leaderless movement gathered together in New York to shout to the world that they have had enough of sitting on the sidelines, watching the world slide off oblivion. All together, we say “no more.”

Here in Chicago, today marks the second day of solidarity with our brothers and sisters in arms in New York, and our compatriots and friends are making preparations to or already gathering across the nation. We can do this, we will do this, we must do this. This is more than angst and anger, more that outrage, more than a mere class war. This is a fight for our future – the future of every living being across this magnificent planet.

We just have to actually believe it. It’s fine and good to have something to say. It’s fine to run in the streets, shouting slogans and holding banners, but it will take more than just a clever catch phrase to undo more than a century of inequality. We have to fight, not with weapons and not only with words. We have to fight with ideas and examples. We have to live our lives as a testament to what things should be, can be, and aught to be.

There is more power in a single one on one conversation with a friend, neighbor or stranger than an entire network of television screens. There is more power in the dream of a brighter future than an entire magazine of bullets. We just have to mean it when we say it.

If you can make it out, find a rally in your home town by using Occupy Together. If you cannot, you can donate in Chicago here and to New York here. If you’re local to Chicago, you can also help by spreading the word, helping acquire supplies and standing in Spirit with everyone, together.